This interview is important, as is the book (Eve, by Cat Bohannon) that it is featuring – but the article linked below is short and sweet, shorter than listening to the interview, if you feel overwhelmed as I often do, by the immense amount of available content!
From the interview/article, if even that – reading the article – feels like too much, because I thought this segment was particularly relevant:
On the differences between male and female brains
“If you manage to have two cadaver brains in your hands, you actually will not be able to tell which is male and which is female. And that’s true by almost any measure. Even if you are using microscopes, even if you are using the most careful instruments, the only way to actually do it is to sluice the whole thing down in a blender and sequence the DNA and look for the Y chromosome, because the brain is actually made of many, many different regions. And there are some typical sex differences in some features in some regions, but the differences are so subtle, and even a brain that might have a so-called female typical region would then end up having a male typical other region. You end up with a mosaicism and that means that what human brains really evolved to be is remarkably similar, more similar in many ways, both in structure and in overall functionality than they are for other mammals.”
And if the title of this blog post confuses, here’s another pertinent quote from the article:
Bohannon says that though regulations have shifted in recent years, pharmaceutical companies are not required to go back and redo past experiments — which means “the vast majority” of prescription medicines currently on the market may not have been tested female bodies at all. This could have implications for how well they work for women, trans men and some nonbinary people.
“So effectively, we’ve been guinea pigs,” she says.
*Guinea pigs, and not just in science research, but in the manner and form of all vehicular design, furniture design, tool design, architectural design – the list goes on and on. Air bags in cars and SUVs weren’t designed for the average person, including women, until 2005, leading to worse outcomes (including suffocation) when women were involved in crashes. This shit matters, in other words.